‘Everyone’s gone,’ I say. ‘Howie, everyone.’
He ignores this, continues his calculations.
‘The fund’s finished,’ I tell him, and when he doesn’t respond to this either, push a little harder: ‘It was all a fraud. A Ponzi scheme. I imagine the money Howie paid out to the investors was the money he was getting from new clients. Everything else he took for himself.’
Scritch-scratch goes the pen, filling the wall with infinitesimal signs.
‘He didn’t use your model,’ I say gently. ‘Do you understand? You, your providential antinomies, you were just props. None of it was real.’
‘None of this is reality!’ Grisha rejoins, with an impatient wave at everything outside the cupboard. ‘Only this!’ He taps vehemently on the walls with his pen.
‘The instrument?’
He scowls, scrubs his shaggy head, muttering under his breath; then, twisting quickly, as if he is about to rise and strike me, he says, in a high, querulous voice, ‘You peoples are thinking you can use maths like slave! Do this, do that — I laugh at you, ha! ha! ha! You are like shadows who think they can direct the sun!’
He stops, looks over my shoulder. Someone is standing in the doorway. It’s Howie’s Bulgarian dealer. In his hand is an ice pick. We don’t move; we don’t even breathe. He has lost his sunglasses; for a long moment he stares at us with incomprehensible eyes. Then he turns away. A moment later, from down the hall, we hear rampaging noises, terrorized cries.
‘Come to Life,’ I tell Grisha. ‘It’s not safe here.’
‘Life,’ Grisha repeats mockingly.
‘Everyone’s down there.’
‘Dance while you can, little shadow,’ he says softly, returning to his equations. ‘Dance in the light.’
AgroBOT staff are the only customers in Life Bar; the semi-darkness and sticky floor seem a better fit for us in our degraded state than Transaction House.
‘Claude, Claude …’ Liam English, far drunker than their short time in the pub would seem to allow, half-stands to greet me. ‘Asseyez-vous, Claude. What’ll you have?’ Pulling a wad of notes from his pocket, he stumbles off without waiting for an answer.
‘Check it out, Claude.’ Jocelyn Lockhart points at the plasma screen on the wall. ‘Miles has been taken in for questioning.’
The screen shows the silver-haired head of Royal Irish jauntily strolling into a police station, where, the newsreader informs us sonorously, he will be questioned for up to thirty-six hours.
‘New minister making his presence felt,’ Dave Davison comments.
‘Bollocks,’ Joe Peston says. ‘Miles is sat in there watching Home and Away while the coppers bring him fish and chips. It’s all just a show for the little people.’
‘I can’t believe that that fucking clip joint is still trading and we’re going under,’ Gary McCrum says darkly.
‘Maybe Porter should have moved the HQ to Ireland,’ Jocelyn says.
‘Fuck Porter.’
‘Here, Claude, have you seen Howie?’ Ish asks me. ‘There were some people in here looking for him.’
I shake my head, ask what’s happening with Barclays.
‘Nada,’ Gary says. ‘They’re still in talks. I’m not holding my breath.’
‘I heard Porter’s not even there,’ Dave says. ‘It’s that little guy again. The co-global head of whatever.’
‘I’ll say this for Porter, he’s a cool customer.’ Jocelyn sighs, topping up his beer. ‘His bank goes down the tubes and he doesn’t break a sweat? I mean, he must have a ton of preferred stock, right? What’s that going to cost him? And still he’s nowhere to be found.’
At this, Ish starts; then she sinks slowly back into her chair, her expression somewhere between perplexity and horror, as if she’s struggling with some demonic conundrum whose solution leads straight to the charnel house. On the TV over her head, the news cycles on: a car burning in a street in Oran, the new Irish finance minister announcing four new jobs at a toilet-brush factory, floods in Bangladesh, in Prague, in Cork, the AgroBOT press conference again, with the caption Death: look at the upside.
The sun begins to set. More bodies appear in the doorway’s pocket of golden dusk and, with the same half-ironical, half-hopeless smile, make their way over to our table. Traders, analysts, salesmen, back office: people I’ve never spoken to, people whose names I don’t even know. The eschatological atmosphere, the sense that beyond our little ring of survivors — illuminated now by candles the barman has set down on the grouped tables — darkness prevails, brings to mind those medieval books in which a small band of travellers, fleeing plague or disaster, take refuge in a waystation and pass the night exchanging tales.
‘Remember the time the fire alarm went off, and then when we went back inside, it went off again?’
‘Remember that intern Howie kept giving extra accounts to? And he took all that meth, and tried to jump out the window?’
‘Remember the time the fire alarm went off?’ says Torquil Quinn, just arrived, taking off his scarf. ‘And then when we went back inside, it went off again?’ He is surprised by the muted reception this gets.
‘Well, lookit,’ Dave Davison sums up, ‘whatever happens, we can’t complain. We’ve had a good run of it.’
‘AgroBOT is a great bank,’ Liam English concurs emotionally, prodding the table with his index finger so the glasses shake. ‘A great bloody bank. And if it goes down because we had the guts to take a chance and do things counterintuitively, there’s no shame in that.’ Then, noticing through his whiskey fog that this hasn’t had the galvanizing effect he intended, ‘Though it won’t go down,’ he adds.
‘I’ve been thinking about moving on anyway,’ Joe Peston says. ‘Maybe it’s time to give something back.’
Heads nod, and the conversation turns to restoring old boats, teaching underprivileged children, other long-cherished dreams whose hour may at last have come. Then Liam English’s phone rings. Instantly silence falls across the table. Liam makes a show of indifference, looking at the number, appearing to think it over. ‘Rachael,’ he says, picking it up at last. ‘Yeah … okay … right … okay, grand. I will, yes. Okay.’
He puts the phone down, lifts his glass, sips, gasps with satisfaction. Finally he becomes aware of the many eyes staring at him. ‘So Barclays have passed,’ he says.
There is an audible, collective gasp, followed by a long, wintry nothing.
‘So that’s it,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says bitterly.
‘I just bought a Jaguar!’ Brent Kelleher moans. ‘Now I’m going to be one of those people who go around the supermarket checking which is the cheapest muesli?’
‘There could still be a buyout,’ Terry Fosco pleads. ‘Like, by someone else.’
‘Who’s going to be dumb enough to buy eight billion dollars’ worth of radioactive Greek shit?’
On the TV screen over the bar, the new Minister for Finance, toilet brush in his hand, perorates soundlessly from a podium. Around our table, too, silence reigns. No one mentions the underprivileged or boat restoration.
‘Fuck it!’ Dave Davison exclaims. ‘We can’t spend our last fucking night sitting round feeling sorry for ourselves!’
‘You’re right!’ Gary McCrum joins in. ‘We’re AgroBOT! If we’re going to go down, we should do it in style!’
‘VD’s?’
‘Let’s roll!’
In the blink of an eye, we are in our coats, the prospect of one last blowout on expenses lending us superhuman speed. I catch Ish’s eye; she shrugs, not wanting to go home any more than I do, and gathers up her belongings.